1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon AA unity.
3. The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.
5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
6. An AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.
(Excerpts from the Twelve Traditions)
The message: we are one, united (Tradition 1) in identity (alcoholics, Tradition 3) and in purpose (Tradition 5), with no other purpose (Tradition 6) and no opinion on outside matters (10). What matters is these principles, not the particular features of the person (Tradition 12).
To single any person out goes against AA principles. To
single any category of persons out goes against AA principles. The use of the
word ‘people’ in the revised preamble (instead of men and women) is entirely in
accordance with this. The term is wholly inclusive and does not single out the
sexes or attempt to provide a taxonomy of sexes and genders: it’s very neat and
tidy. It also circumvents the controversies that could arise from outside
ideologies (traditional or radical).
But by the same token, singling out groups in AA (newcomers, shy sharers, people of a particular sex, gender, or sexual orientation, membership of the armed forces or veteran status, people of a particular ethnicity, people with a particular profession or occupation, sufferers of other addictions, being a ‘double winner’, holders of dual diagnoses, sufferers of other illnesses, adherents of particular religions, atheists, agnostics, free thinkers, young people) runs against all of the above principles, emphasising as it does separation and difference, eroding unity, and dragging in outside purposes and outside ideologies.
This goes for meeting and event identification and identity: a men’s meeting, an LGBT etc. meeting, a young people’s AA conference,
even if it is technically non-restrictive (i.e. people outside the category are
stated as welcome to attend), has the purpose of producing a skewed membership.
Some members are simply more welcome than others. This breaches all of the
above traditions.
This also goes within the meeting. Special sections of sharing for special categories of person. Special reps for special newcomers (male, female, trans or queer). Why not a newcomer's rep for black people, and another for white? Why not a newcomer's rep for conservatives and another for liberals? Why not a newcomer's rep for people with a post-graduate degree and another for people who did not complete high school?
As Eddie, who was gay, used to say, "I drank alcoholically, not homosexually."
And Old Frank, at Toynbee Hall many years ago, when he heard someone say, ‘The
men sponsor the men; the women sponsor the women,’ said, ‘How about alcoholics
sponsor alcoholics?’ Guardians of the Traditions, indeed!